Camila Moraes lives and works between Colombia and Brazil. She keeps us up-to-date with news about film events that focus on European films and their directors in the South American continent.

07 August, 2008

6th Catalan Film Festival in Sao Paulo brings “the other Titanic” to Brazil

A scene of Bigas Luna's La camarera de Titanic (1997).

The 6th edition of the Catalan Film Festival in Sao Paulo (southeast of Brazil) started two days ago with a special attraction: the movie La camarera del Titanic (“The Chambermaid on the Titanic”), directed by Bigas Luna and released in 1997.

The title makes a great pair with Titanic, directed by North-American director James Cameron in the same year. While the blockbuster shows a love story between a rich girl and a plebeian, the Catalan version of the ship disaster is focused on the involvement of a chambermaid with a proletarian in a dreamlike atmosphere – which is far from the grandiosity of the drama represented by Kate Winslet and Leonardo Di Caprio.

The work of Juan José Bigas Luna, born in Barcelona in 1946, is the theme of a short retrospective organized by the Catalan Film Festival. Director of two well recognized movie pictures – one being La camarera del Titanic, which will be exhibited in Sao Paulo in 35 mm –, the Spanish director has participated on the Cannes Film Festival in 1978 with Bilbao and is told to be the discover of recognized Spanish actors such as Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz (both actors of Luna’s Jamón Jamón; see it here).

The 6th edition of the Catalan Film Festival in Sao Paulo takes place in Centro Cultural São Paulo, at Rua Vergueiro, number 1000. Here is the complete program, which goes on until next Sunday, 10th of August: